


To Know Without Knowing

by fadagaski



Category: Mad Max Series (Movies)
Genre: Canon Compliant, Gen, Minor Character Backstory, Serious Injuries, Tags Are Hard, this has nothing to do with toast i'm sorry titles are hard
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-09-19
Updated: 2015-09-19
Packaged: 2018-04-21 13:18:11
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,886
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4830512
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fadagaski/pseuds/fadagaski
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>She is old. Elle is old and worn and sick with grief. Her sisters – all but one – are dead in the dust behind them. Their furious hope is wheezing in ever more painful breaths and she knows this, she has seen this before, she knows how this ends. </p><p> </p><p>  <i>Or: why doesn't that nameless Vuvalini woman do anything when Furiosa is dying in the back of the Gigahorse?</i></p>
            </blockquote>





	To Know Without Knowing

**Author's Note:**

> I've read lots of different stories with lots of different interpretations as to why the nameless Vuvalini, who knows exactly what is wrong with Furiosa, would choose not to do anything about it. Here's my interpretation.

She is old. Elle is old and worn and sick with grief. Her sisters – all but one – are dead in the dust behind them. Their furious hope is wheezing in ever more painful breaths and she knows this, she has seen this before, she knows how this ends. 

“Why is she making that noise?” asks the young one, the one that reminds Elle of herself. That noise, that godawful noise, grating in and out –

*

Elle is young, but not so young she can’t see that the world is teetering on the brink and her dad, her blessed dad, cannot bear to leave her at home alone. “It’s too dangerous,” he says, the frown pinching deep crevices between his silver-speckled eyebrows. Water is scarce and there are rumours of gangs prowling like rabid, ravenous dingoes in the outback.

The power cuts out.

Elle is old enough that darkness shouldn’t scare her, but it does. She has always been afraid. Squeaking, she curls into his chest, ear pressed to the steady thump-thump of his heart, and closes her eyes. A darkness of her own choosing is better than one forced on her. 

“You’ll have to come in the ambulance,” he rumbles above her head, his arms like a shield against the ravages of the world. “Just – just don’t look. Please.” She nods once, like a promise.

When the world shatters, as they all knew it would – could see coming, like a train bearing down on a car stuck on the tracks – it happens in slow motion. For a while, things go on as they always have. People go to work. She goes to school – for a while at least. There’s still food. The water rationing continues. But then … people start to go a little mad. Thieving, pillaging, and worse things besides that she tries not to hear about. 

Not her dad, though. Every day he gets in that ambulance and drives wherever he’s needed, picks up whoever’s injured there, and takes them to whatever little building is calling itself a hospital. Elle curls up in the passenger seat, staring out at the starry sky as her dad rummages in the back, stitching and stabilising whoever is moaning there. 

“Should I … Can I help?” she’d asked, once. 

He’d shaken his head, and looked at her in that way he did, like she was the most precious jewel on the planet and at any moment she could be taken from him, tarnished and broken – like the thought of it haunted his nightmares. 

So she sat in the passenger seat and listened to the rumble of his voice as he talked to himself and didn’t show her face. For her dad, she would remain innocent of it all.

Until one time there’s not just his quiet narration and the whimpers of the injured. Instead, there’s a terrible wheezing sound, like a sandstorm squeezing through a gap in the shutters. Dad sounds more harried than usual, and the gasping, moaning noise buzzes in Elle’s ears until she can’t stand it. Despite her promise, she has to look.

“What’s that noise?” she asks. There’s a man on the gurney, and his blood-soaked shirt has been cut open and his chest is mottled and straining and her dad gazes at her with wide, pained eyes.

“He’s pumping air into his chest cavity, collapsing his lungs,” he says softly. “Please – don’t look.” 

Elle slumps down into her seat and listens as her dad works and the wheezing changes to a sudden gasp. Then her dad’s in the front seat, blood staining his scrubs, turning the ignition and peeling out of there like blue lightning. She wants to ask what happened, how he fixed it, but he’s frowning at the road and the man behind them is gasping and gurgling. 

Elle wraps her arms around herself and lets the ambulance rock her.

*

“She’s pumping air into her chest cavity,” Elle says. “She’s collapsing her lungs one breath at a time.”

But the man, the stranger, he moves with abrupt purpose. There’s a blade suddenly in his hand – Elle’s thoughts fly to _disinfectant_ and _bacteria_ \- and he’s saying “I know” and “I am so sorry” and she can’t believe he’s going to do it and then the knife is between Furiosa’s ribs and she’s gasping, gasping clear.

The stranger wads up cloth, presses it to Furiosa’s side, pulls Elle’s hand to the wound with barely a look at her. “Press firmly,” he mutters and then his hands are cradling Furiosa’s head. “Hey,” he says, meeting wet, bewildered eyes. “Hey.” 

Elle presses her hand against the hole, feels blood slipping out, so much blood. A person can bleed so much before the end. 

“No no no no no.” His eyes are desperately wide, his hands frantic, and Furiosa – Furiosa is corpse pale –

*

Elle is middle-aged – whatever that means in this skeletal world – and she has a car that moves and a caravan that doesn’t and a man and a daughter and a grave out back marked by a single, unadorned stone where her dad sleeps eternally. It’s not a life like she expected before the end, before her mum was vaporised and the water vanished into the sky, but it’s okay. Warren is good to her and Hope is a joy, and every day Elle tills the earth with her neighbours.

The raiders come the hour before dawn. 

There’s no warning. No demands. No pretence of trade. They slam into town on trikes that roar like wild animals. The men shoot through the thin aluminium walls, the sound like the stones whipped up in a sandstorm. There is screaming, and laughing, and gunshots and smashes. Elle wakes with a start, pulls Hope close. 

“Out the back,” Warren whispers. They scurry in the dark, ducking low beneath the windows. Hope is a heavy weight in her arms; Elle keeps her wrapped inside her cardigan as they tiptoe down the steps. They have just escaped the caravan when they hear the front door open, and heavy boots enter what was their home. There’s no time to regret, no time for anger. Only time to run.

Warren points at the car and she follows him. Her heart is pounding against her ribcage. Hope is beginning to squirm. Elle places her hand against her head, holds her close with the other arm. Warren peeks around the side of the caravan. Elle holds her breath.

When he runs, she runs. 

There are shouts. Bullets spray the air around them. Elle clutches Hope and runs and runs, feet catching and cutting on sharp rocks but she can’t stop, can’t fall, keeps her eyes fixed on Warren sprinting ahead of her, hears her heart thundering in her ears and Hope screaming and the bullets slamming into earth and sky and everything in between.

Warren reaches the car. Warren gets the door open. Warren’s shoulder and thigh bloom with red splatters. Elle hears herself croak a breathless kind of scream but her body is on automatic. There are engines and booted feet behind her, coming closer. She does not turn to look. She throws Hope into the back of the car, hoists Warren in after her with strength she didn’t know she had, slides into the driver’s seat and turns the ignition. The engine roars to life. Elle floors the accelerator without even shutting the door. It slams into the raider, knocking him off his feet. The tyres spin when they hit the road, back end fishtailing, but then they’re ploughing forward and people dive out of her way and Elle can’t hear anything over the shriek of the engine and her own heaving breaths. 

The sky blushes pink. Elle come back to herself. Her hands, her legs, her – everything is shaking. The engine is too hot, too long running on the red line. There’s no sign of anyone in the rearview mirror, just Hope, curled up against the door, face shiny with silent tears, and Warren. Warren, pale and crumpled. 

Elle slams the brakes. In seconds she has the door open, leaning over him, hands fluttering and useless as she takes in the rivers of blood pouring out of his body, the lake that has formed under him. She can taste it, iron at the back of her throat. His lids are half-closed and translucent, dark irises drifting listlessly beneath them.

“Warren,” she says, and dares to stroke his face. He frowns, eyes opening reluctantly. 

“Elle,” he mouths. She bends over him, lifts his head so he can sip the water from the canteen she digs out from under the driver’s seat. His hair is slick with blood, it’s dripping down her arm, his lips are white as the water slips between them. She can feel blood soaking the knee she has pressed to the seat. _Exsanguinated_ rumbles a gentle voice out of her past, and she hates her dad in that moment for not showing her how to fix this. 

“Mummy,” Hope moans, whimpering anew, but Elle cannot look at her right now. She cradles Warren’s head in her hands and tears stream down her face and there’s a scream lodged in her throat and he stops breathing and she shakes him, shakes him again but Warren has gone, has left her alone, the essence of him soaking into the fabric of the backseat, turning it black as night. Elle presses her forehead to his not-breathing chest and lets out a ragged, breathless cry. 

Eventually she moves. Eventually she gets up, back aching and hot from the sun. Eventually she lifts Hope into her arms and lets her suckle at her breast, sitting slantways in the driver’s seat, the smell of iron coating her like oil. She can feel it, dried and sticky, on her hands and on her knees and on her forehead, but she doesn’t wipe it off. Hope is patchy with it too. She doesn’t wipe that either. 

Eventually she closes the driver’s door and turns the ignition, and the car rumbles through the desert. Hope sits in her lap, tucked under Elle’s bloodied cardigan, and they drive until day becomes night becomes day again. 

When she reaches a town she stops, because they’re out of guzzoline and she’s out of options and there’s a dead body in the back that is starting to bloat. The stain never does come out of the seat.

*

“She’s exsanguinated, drained all her blood,” Elle says, and the stranger is moving fast, ripping the plastic tubing from his collar, and Elle dares to hope, this one last time, that he can fix it, as he fumbles with the needle and mutters just like her father used to. “Come on,” she whispers to Furiosa. She holds the stranger’s arm as he inserts the needle, feels it flex in the vein under his skin, under her fingers, watches the blood pump up and through.

“Sorry,” he murmurs to Furiosa, unconscious Furiosa. 

The blonde one holds the needle in one end, and Elle holds it in the other, and the stranger leans over Furiosa with dark hands and clear eyes. He cradles her head and murmurs his name and Elle keeps the needle in place and burns with hope. She doesn’t understand what he has done, but now that she is old and worn, she doesn’t look away.


End file.
